Born and raised in San Antonio, Pickett Porterfield is an aspiring writer and avid wanderer. He has lived in Mexico and traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. For more tales from the travel trail, check out his previous blogs at Postcards Home.

Note: This is an mySA.com City Brights Blog. These blogs are not written or edited by mySA or the San Antonio Express-News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.

Let’s Talk Thai

BANGKOK — I’ve been casting around the last couple of days for a theme or angle to write about, and it occurred to me that I’ve yet to devote any ink to a topic rather integral to Thailand: the Thai language. First, however, I feel compelled to admit that, as someone with no innate talent for foreign languages and virtually zero proficiency in Thai, I’m treading on very thin ice here. But what the hell, I’ll give it a shot anyway.

Shoot, Thai looks just like English, don't you think?

It’s a common refrain that one can never truly know a foreign culture without first mastering the language. Language, after all, is at the core of our thought processes and determines to a large extent how we construct those thoughts and share them with one another. In many ways language, with its manifold complexities, is the glue that binds a culture’s collective personality. So even when the locals in a foreign place can communicate more or less effectively in your native tongue—as is often the case with English in Thailand—it’s not quite the same; too many subtleties and nuances too often are simply lost or muddled in translation.

I’ve spent more than two years off and on in Mexico and Latin America, and while I would never dare claim anything even close to a mastery of Spanish, the ability to chat with people about their lives and their thoughts and perspectives has provided me with insights into Latin American culture that I don’t think I’d have obtained without at least a conversational level of Spanish proficiency. Spanish can be a surprisingly tricky language for native English speakers, especially considering how many similarities exist between the two—until, that is, you try your hand at a language like Thai that shares nothing in common with English, not even an alphabet.

While I’ve already admitted defeat and accepted that I’ll never learn more than the most perfunctory of Thai phrases, Julianna, with her natural gift for foreign languages, is determined to crack the code. She began an intensive month-long Thai language course this week and is already acting as my interpreter. The demoralizing difficulty in learning Thai appears to me to be twofold: first, because it’s based on an unfamiliar and dazzlingly arcane alphabet, and second, because it’s tonal, meaning the tone, or pitch, of the word—in addition to its phonetic pronunciation—determines its meaning.

I don’t know a word of French, Italian, German, or any of the dozens of other languages based on the Roman alphabet. But like anyone, I can memorize the spelling of a word in one of these languages, recognize it when I later see it written somewhere, and even jot it down on a piece of paper in an attempt to articulate whatever point I’m trying to communicate. This familiarity with a commonly shared alphabet significantly reduces the difficulty in attempting basic communication. Vietnamese, for example, is a language quite bewildering to me, but because it uses the Roman alphabet things like reading street signs, perusing restaurant menus, and spotting recognizable street names on a map is a fairly straightforward affair.

Thai, on the other hand, with its devilishly foreign script, might as well be hieroglyphics to my untrained eye. I’ve tried on numerous occasions memorizing the spelling of a single word, but when the time comes to reproduce it, or even recognize it, I’m unable to distinguish the word from any others. Add to this the swirly diacritical marks affixed to certain letters to denote the word’s tone, and it all quickly proves to be too much to take in. And that’s just the written language, the form typically easiest for a new learner to navigate. Spoken Thai is the real killer.

It’s difficult enough stumbling—usually with the help of a phrasebook—through a foreign language more familiar to Western ears, like French or Italian, and making all the gaffs that typically illicit snickers from locals who find this butchered version of their proud language quite amusing. We’ve all been there in our own language, when some foreigner approaches with a question or statement put forth in such a perplexing or awkward construction that we’re forced to think about it for a moment. But in these cases the intended meaning, however mispronounced or oddly worded, is usually comprehended because each individual word typically has only one primary definition, and when it does have more than one, the context in which it is used generally clears up any uncertainty. Such a helpful practicality cannot, however, be relied upon when attempting to speak Thai because of its tonal nature.

I don't know what this sign says, but I know there's something a little off about that logo.

There are five tones in Thai—high, low, mid, falling, and rising— and the definition of a word depends on its tone. Not every Thai word has five tonal versions; some have only two or three. Imagine, though, how different our English language would be if a single word had five widely disparate meanings depending on the pitch in which it’s spoken. I’m making up the following example just to put things in context, but a simple word like “cat” could take the shape of a noun, a verb or an adjective and might mean “cat”, “eat”, “stupid”, “adultery”, or “homework,” depending on the particular inflection applied to it. When you stop and think about how truly foreign this is to the Western mind you get an idea of the potential pitfalls and unintended innuendos awaiting the careless or incompetent speaker of Thai. And that’s just the pronunciation. When you factor in a grammar and syntax completely different from our own, it has a way of making my head hurt just thinking about it.

Despite my woefully superficial understanding of the Thai language, my biggest curiosity about it is how the conveyance of emotion and mood is handled in a language that employs highly inflected tones to indicate a word’s meaning. Tone, after all, is one of the primary means of communicating emotion in most languages. In English so much implicit meaning is carried by the inflection in a word’s pronunciation. One word, depending on how you say it, can be construed as a mild or rhetorical inquiry, a demanding question, a gentle or polite statement of fact, a direct order, the list goes on and on. I can’t help wondering how this works in Thai, where the same tones that carry such widely varied emotions in English affect a word’s root definition. I’ve yet to receive a satisfactory explanation, but perhaps it’s really not so different from the way Canadians seem to perennially be asking a question, even when a demonstrative statement clearly is intended.

But either way, the Thai language evades me. With its tongue-twisting complexities and indecipherable alphabet I have little hope of learning more than the most basic of phrases. And I regretfully accept that I’ll most likely never cross that bridge of cultural exchange that comes with proficiency in the local language. But I have great hopes that Julianna, after completing her course, will prove to be a competent translator.